Prof. Glynda A. Hull from the University of California, Berkeley along with her team comprising John Scott, Jessica Adams, Devanshi Unadkat and Dhruv visited Study Hall Educational Foundation in connection with the ‘Write4Change: Online Global Writing Community for Youth Online’ research project which aims to learn about how educators and students create and participate in online writing communities and write for social change. The project also aims to know how visualizing data could help students think about their writing and themselves as writers in new ways.

The participants from Study Hall and Prerna schools were put into 4 groups and they were given access to 360 Virtual Reality camera equipment. The students were acclimatized to the use of the new technology. They confabulated about the social issues or themes to weave their stories around. Thereafter they captured the cityscape with their lens along with their escort teachers. Then they thought about the music, subtitles, narration and special effects to complement their visuals. The resultant videos were about the life of the underprivileged girls in Prerna school, the sights and sounds from the culture, history and cuisine of Lucknow, Women Empowerment and the Socio-cultural diversity of India.

The team from Berkeley was quite impressed with the final outcome and lauded their efforts. They congratulated them for their proactive participation and involvement in all stages of film-making. It was teamwork all through and the efforts shone in every aspect of the videos.

It was a mutually enriching interaction and the students of SHEF in particular Study Hall and Prerna learnt how to use the new technique and compared it with the existing 180-camera technology used currently by them. The use of multi-modal approach was a unique experience.

We hope that this ongoing project would provide access to new technology and an interface with global student communities to share, learn and grow together.